obama mama and the gender bender

This is Barack Obama and his mother.

I found this picture and it made me wonder if the Democratic Party really should be promoting him as the first African-American Presidential nominee ever.

Granted, this is his dad - who is truly from Africa.


Of course, none of this matters, right? In our world today we've learned not to talk about someone's race because it simply doesn't matter.

Remember the TV show Doug?

Maybe you do, maybe you don't. It was Disney's attempt to have a show of kids drawn with odd colors because (as they'd often say about the colors) "It doesn't matter."

Because... it doesn't matter.

Yet when it is convenient, we claim our candidate by race.

Or by gender - as Governor Sarah Palin's nomination seems to be adding to the Republican Party.

Apparently our culture tries to say that this shouldn't matter, either.

And yet for some reason it has.

Odd.

Why does our culture seem to live a life of contradictory truths? We desire things to not be one way, and yet we somehow propogate that very thing. Maybe it's just easier to scrap it out 2-dimensionally than it is to let another person be a complex balance of tensions.

So is this Presidential race now (beneath the surface) about which is bigger and more marketable - race versus gender?

(But not too bigger, because I'm sure we're not really allowed to talk about this anyway. Quickly... move on to something else... I'll meet you back here later.).

P.S. I hope you enjoy this video we made recently. This is our church worship guy and resource guy duking it out. I'm quite convinced you will find the same quality of debate in this ad as you do the ones on TV.